Many of us have burned CDs and found the process to be relatively straightforward - the biggest obstacle is often just getting past the grumpiness built into cdrecord and its latter-day derivatives. Creating data DVDs is not a whole lot harder. So one might be inclined to approach the task of creating a video DVD with a "this will be easy" attitude. It is, in fact, a task just about anybody can learn to do, but it is on a different order of complexity than creating a CD full of music. A video DVD is, in truth, a program complete with its own hierarchical structure, menus, and code written for the simple virtual machine lurking within every DVD player. Creating a playable DVD requires writing that program.
If DVDs are programs, then the one compiler available for Linux systems is the command-line dvdauthor tool. Regardless of how one builds a DVD, dvdauthor will be involved in the process at some point. This tool requires a collection of video objects representing the actual video titles and also implementing the menus, subtitles, and more. It's all tied together via a complex XML file (example) which is compiled by dvdauthor to create the final product.
It is possible to create all of these pieces by hand, and, doubtless, Real Linux Video Jocks would not do it any other way. One can use dvdauthor to help with the generation of parts of the XML file. There is documentation which seems fairly complete, if a bit terse. But the fact of the matter is that most people attempting to use this tool directly will give up in despair. There is no reason why DVD authors should have to work at this level; dvdauthor is essentially an assembler which, while being absolutely essential to do most of the heavy lifting, should be hidden from most polite company. DVD creation is a visual task; there should be visually-oriented tools for this job. The good news is that these tools do, indeed, exist.
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test comment on creating DVD video
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